My Photographic Memories
by EvilDMMk3
Summary: Leo Daguerre is a Wierdo with Europol, a specialist with a niche qurik who assists in investigating cases in a Europe left fractured and unstable by the emergance of Quriks.


My Deathless Corpse.

The first incident was in Qing Qing City. An extraordinary child was born who radiated light. After that, reports to people with superpower popped up all across the globe. No one knew what was causing this quirks. Before long, the supernatural became the totally normal. Dreams a reality. The world became a superhuman society with about 80% of the population possessing some uncanny ability. Our streets looks like scenes from comic books. A city swirled with chaos and confusion, a new profession dominated our collective consciousness. It was an age of heroes.

My name is Leo Daguerre. I am not a hero, but I've worked with a fair few. Mostly they're less than impressive in person, driven by money or fame or spending half their time engaged in gossip or bragging. A few of them, well, scandal is as scandal does. Still, there's a few, like John Bull or Regina Pacis that remind me that there's genuine people out there in every profession, and it isn't like the average baker or mason is putting their lives on the line.

My official job title is "Hague operations expert support specialist", except officially my job title is in Dutch. No one calls me that however, everyone just calls us Weirdos.

There are a lot of people with Quirks, or Individualities to use the term that appears on all of the official paperwork I spend most of my time working on (and literally nowhere else), that are deeply valuable in certain circumstances but useless the rest of the time. In the Euro-pol area such people are employed by The Hauge and get loaned out as needed. The rest of the time we do paperwork and admin. It needs doing after all.

I share an office designed for one rather important person with two other people, but Colette's ability to always recognise someone's voice means she spends almost all her day in the audio lab meaning that I mostly just shared the room with Vincent, who can analyse the chemical composition of substances by taste. He gets less actual work calls than I do but its almost all in the field.

Of the three of us I'm the only one with any sort of physical tell to my quirk, for all that we tease Colette about her ears they are human big, not quirk big. My otherwise uninteresting brown irises look like old fashioned camera shutters for some reason. My actual quirk is that if I look at a picture of a person who has died I know exactly how they died. The sensation is hard to describe, its like if someone starts telling a joke you heard before but a long time ago, once they start you know the punchline, but if you had tried before that you wouldn't have known how the joke went.

It isn't very fun. I don't watch much in the way of old media if I can help it. Cartoons are fine, unless a character is heavily based on a real person, but watching old live action movies is really distracting, which is a roundabout way of saying I've never seen Star Wars.

It was a warm and oppressively humid day in late summer and I sat at my desk, my fan slowly oscillating back and forth, doing my usual Monday morning chore of looking through the missing persons photos sent to Europol over the weekend and sending a form reply, alive or method of death. Only high priority or stale cases get passed my way, so it's rarely good news.

I hate Mondays.

My phone rang as I locked eyes with a laughing young lady with dark skin and a pair of cute little tusks in a shot clearly cropped from a larger group photograph. Slit wrists. The light on the phone told me it was an external line. I put on my best civil servant impression. "Europol The Hauge, Extraordinary Advisory department Office 23B." I'm Dutch but English is the langauge we use at work for reasons that are of interest only if you are looking to start political arguments to get out of doing your work.

"Bonjour, I wish to speak with Leo Daguerre."

"Speaking."

"My name is Dr Canard, Chief Pathologist for the, ah, general Paris region?"

"Oh, well how can I help?" I don't get as many calls from Pathologists as you might think, they tend to be able to work out things themselves and in greater detail. Sometimes knowing which stab wound was the fatal one matters, but usually not.

"I am, I am sorry to say, stuck. I have a cadaver here that I can find no cause of death for, no indication in fact of any injury. It is highly distressing." I could see his point, a quirk that let you kill without leaving any evidence was a common hypothetical nightmare for law enforcement.

"I see. Give me your email and I'll send you the form and where to send it" Bureaucracy, where was the person with the quirk to kill that? "I can't see why it would get turned down."

"D'accord." He read it off and I sent him the form and The Crab's email address. Knowing the old woman it would be a few hours even if the good doctor emailed right away.

"Anything interesting? Going anywhere?" Vincent asked, not out of interest you understand but out of a desire not to be completing his data entry.

"Probably not. The Crab shall decide."

"So no then." The Crab didn't like travel expenses. Forget that we were also trained scene of the crime agents and had the authority to work in other countries, and even deputise out-of-region heroes if needed, The Crab held to the opinion that there was no reason for us to leave the office, possibly because of how much of a hassle travel often was for them. I didn't mind much. I had been to Paris before and didn't get on well with the Gendarmerie who sat a little too close to the underground for my liking.

At around 11, I had just gone for a cup of coffee, an email arrived from The Crab.

_Leo,_

_I see from his email chain Dr Canard has already circumvented correct contact procedure, please ensure he doesn't do it again._

_Morgue photo attached._

_Martina Granchio_

_Manager, Extraordinary Advisory Department._

_Europol_

Initially I attributed what happened to my not having looked properly due to how hard me eyes had been rolling. It could happen sometimes, I could miss it if it an image had been in my peripheral vision too long. I had also been using my quirk all morning, which could make my eyes tired and hazy. I closed my eyes, took a sip of coffee, and then opened my eyes.

"Rebooting?" Vincent asked, knowing full well what I was doing but looking, again, for a reason to not be doing make-work paper-work.

"Uh-hu." I opened my eyes. "Huh." That was odd. Well, no, it was more than odd, it was unprecedented.

I went back to my missing persons, there were still a dozen left in the stack. Nothing, nothing, nothing, I got worried at this point, truth be told it was rare for that many people in a row of the type sent to me not to have would up dead. I was relieved, then embarrassed, when the picture of the old man told me death by exposure.

I looked back at the morgue photo. Nothing. Did he have some sort of appearance altering or information based quirk that was working despite his death maybe? The doctor had attached his file and I went to open it.

"What's up?" I jumped a little, I hadn't noticed Vincent walk up behind me. It was annoying, but I couldn't lie, I'd bugged him about his work when I had been stuck on fill-in stuff myself. I claim many sins, hypocrisy isn't one of them.

"Far as I can tell, this man hasn't died."

"Looks pretty definitively dead to me. I think that's his stomach in that jar, just poking in on the left."

"Nope." I said, opening the file and covering the image. "They take the photo before they cut them open. Let me see, Patient Name:Phillippe Dubout. Age:47."

"Looks good for it. Considering."

"Quirk Registration: None."

"Quirkless eh? Poor sod." Vincent hadn't actually realised he had a quirk until he was in his early teens, he told me once that he didn't realise that other people's senses of taste weren't as precise as half a day in an Analytical Laboratory until he got into an argument about if a cake someone had baked was gluten free or not, his mother had apparently just taken him for a picky eater. The whole thing had left him with a complex about bullies.

"Was he?"

"It says so right there."

"No, that doesn't say Quirk: None. It says Quirk _Registration_: None."

"Someone's grasping at straws."

"Its either that or my quirk has started breaking down."

"Maybe you're tired?"

"Its 11:15 on Monday morning."

"Flashcards?"

I sighed. "Fine, flashcards."

They weren't real flashcards, it was just what I called the program that had been written to flash up images with known causes of death that I had to run through monthly in case a lawyer ever tried to argue the accuracy of my quirk in court. They hadn't so far.

I watched the images flash up as Vincent checked my answers. "Stabbed in the ascending aorta with a serrated steel knife. Congestive heart failure. Pulmonary embolism. Pneumonia secondary to dimished immune system caused by cancer. Nothing. Nothing. Secondary drowning, I wish they'd stop putting kids on this thing. Nothing. Nothing. Stroke. Quirk related auto-toxicity. Blood loss. Shock secondary to burns. Paracetamol overdose. Quirk related electrical damage to brain."

"Fifteen out of fifteen."

I turned back to Phillippe. Still nothing. "If he's still alive, I feel really sorry for him."

"Maybe he has some sort of hibernation quirk he isn't aware of?"

"He's had an autopsy. Doesn't matter when the picture is from, if he died on their slab I'd know."

"Some sort of powerful stasis quirk then? Maybe anatomical separation?"

"Not everyone has a secret quirk they don't know about Vincent. No, something else is going on here. This man is dead, but he didn't die."

You know how some words and sentences start sounding like non-words the more you use them? Turns out the reverse isn't true. No matter how often I said it "He's dead but he didn't die" never started sounding like anything but gibberish. Not when I typed it out to send to Dr Canard, not when I did the paperwork for the Crab, not when I was on the phone with the Crab, not when I was in the Crab's office with the head of international co-operation, not when I was on the phone with Paris' Commissaire de Police who called while I was in the Crab's office, not even while I was staring at the police reports, sat on the train (second class, before you ask) speeding between The Hauge and Paris.

Give the Crab her due, she backed me up when she detected an insinuation that I might have been playing some sort of elaborate or poor taste prank, although I don't think that's what Commissarie Durand meant.

My French is passable thanks to summer holidays with Grand-mère and translation apps have come a long way. Seems Mr Dubout had owned a pig farm that had been in the family a few generations and did his own slaughtering and ham-making, sausages, bacon-curing. The whole hog. His death had been tied in to an ongoing investigation by the French Health Bureau, it didn't say why but an inspector had made a surprise visit to his business address and, while waiting for her team, had found him not only dead but also naked on a slab usually used for joining a pig's carcase. His file was otherwise very thin. Quirk registration is technically mandatory in most of Europe, but France is one of the easier counties to avoid it. If you miss Quirk registration day at school and then never end up either needed your quirk for your job or needing to go in for medical treatment you just slide straight into the cracks. The underground like it that way (and they are influential enough, particularly in the capitol region, that agitating them is a bad idea) and even honest citizens can wind up unregistered if the pattern of their life bends that way. Mr Dubout definitely had a life that bent that way, he wasn't even registered with a doctor

His business partner, wife and main assistant had all been interviewed and all had alibis even when you took their quirks into consideration. Son lacked an alibi as he had apparently been cutting class but he shared his mother's quirk, the ability to regrow missing or decayed teeth, which couldn't explain the lack of a death. Company was doing well as far as the police could tell with the only oddity being a small but steady stream, about €300 a month, of cash deposits that didn't have an obvious source. Local police were looking into the possibility that he was blackmailing someone, but the problem at the moment wasn't motive it was the fact of death.

When I got off the train Dr Canard was waiting for me. He was accompanied by a man in a suit who I assumed was a detective. I wasn't surprised when I saw him to discover that he had a duck-based quirk, lots of families have changed their surnames to reflect strong inherited quirks, I was a little taken aback that he resembled less a duck from a duckpond and more a duck from a children's first book of animals. Big round head, big round body, big wide bill all left me half expecting to see "D is for Duck" floating above his head. The lab coat, boots and what I assumed were prescription goggles at least looked, well, not normal but also not like a refugee from a children's book.

I walked over and held out my hand "Doctor Canard?" I tried to make sure my it sounded like a question, just on the off chance that the world was having another joke at my expense.

"Oui." I couldn't read his facial expression, it was a combination of the bill and the fact that he was at most 4 and a half feet tall but I think he sounded amused. His hand was covered in tiny downy feathers in a way that made it both soft and unsettling to touch. "And this is my good friend Richard Blanc."

"Bonjour Monsieur Daguerre. I have been asked to assist you during your time here." He didn't seem too pleased.

"How helpful, I've been asked to assist you during my time here, so we should get on swimmingly."

There was a nod and an awkward pause before Blanc gestured in the direction of the station entrance where there was an unmarked car waiting.

"Your office has booked you a Hotel?" Blanc asked as Dr Canard slid into the modified driver's seat. I suppose it made sense, why would the police have a car he could ride in?

"Yes indeed." I gave Dr Canard the address. It was near police HQ and rather basic, I'd stayed before. Small beds that prevented the wardrobe from opening fully and an ensuite whose sink you could reach from the loo. Your tax money at work folks. "However given the time it would probably be better if I went to the office first, get an hour in and then check in afterwards."

"Dacord. For the moment I too am working directly with the Gendarme, until I can establish that the cause of death." I let the implication that my quirk was wrong slide past. "I shall have to take you to dinner, no please" he acted like I was about to object, I wasn't "I insist."

"Very well Doctor, so long as we don't fall into the trap of talking shop."

I could have sworn he quacked at that. I decided to treat it as a laugh.

The team handling the case turned out to be smaller than I expected. It seemed that while they considered the matter important enough to pull other people's resources the Gendamery only felt it warranted two police officers. Blanc and, I kid you not, Jean-Marrie Noir. If you are assuming that they were put together because someone had a sense of humour you might be right, but it was more likely a result of her ability to emit radio waves and his ability to hear them.

Daft if you ask me, considering that they seemed to disagree about everything almost on principle and radios were standard issue.

Their clashing personalities also slowed down the briefing so that it took the whole hour just to go over the file. Scene of the crime officers were still finishing working over the abattoir, so that was what I would be up to tomorrow. The only questions that I got answers to were in the negative. No trace on the mystery money, which Blanc thought was vital and Noir dismissed as a red herring. His clothes were missing but the only trace of those were some fibres that had caught on a hook which Noir felt was significant but Blanc argued could be of any age. Noir thought it was probably a private matter, given the location of the body and the apparent intended method of disposal, Blanc felt that, given the nature of the death, it was a professional hit, he even name-dropped _L'ancienne et néfaste société de la corde noire_, one of Europol's favourite and probably fictional boogeymen (depending on who you ask they were either the world's premier society of quirk using assassins, or a fictional organisation invented by the tabloid press to allow lurid speculation into the deaths of celebrities). Blanc was sure Dubont was quirkless and his doctors had just been lazy, Noir seemed to agree his non-registration was odd but attributed it to it being embarrassing.

It went on like that. After a while I lost focus, partly because I was sick and tired of sitting in an odd-couple comedy and partly because something about the abattoir was getting on my nerves. Not the main floor, but the side room where the body had been found. Apparently during the time of the deceased's father the floor office was converted into additional butchering space, to facilitate their pork product business apparently. The room was small and clearly an awkward shape for the job, but there was something else too, something I wasn't seeing.

I finally worked it out when I visited the washroom at dinner with Dr Canard, who kept entirely off the subject of his job and police work but rather annoyingly on fishing. The room had a lock it not dissimilar to the kind you find in lavatory cubicles. It was obviously unlocked when the inspector had arrived, but why would you need a lock designed for just the inside?

I'd have to have a look myself.

Between the street noise, the hard bed and the rather too good cup of coffee I had had after dinner I had just managed to fight my way to sleep when my phone started ringing. It was Noir.

"Hello? Yes?"

"Sorry but Richard argued it was best to call you in particular as you are Scene of the crime certification?"

"I am, I mean, yes I have."

"You do not need to come." The tone implied she didn't want me to come. "But we can send a car. The home of Monsieur Dubont was broken into an hour ago."

"I though the address was vacant?"

"It is, the family are staying with friends at my recommendation, in case whoever killed Dubont has further interest with him, as it seems that he does. A neighbour heard glass breaking."

"Well I can help with Scene of the Crime sure, but won't you have your own people? And its not like I have…" I trailed off the explanation here as there was an argument ongoing at the other end of the line. I was about to explain that I didn't have any forensic equipment with me.

"If we send a car can you meet us at the property tomorrow morning?"

"Sure. When will the car be here?" More arguing.

"8:30."

"Lovely. Goodnight."

Coffee is a wonderful thing. A wash, a shave and what I am sure was a leftover croissant from the day before didn't do half as much to get me feeling awake and, debatably, human, as the second cup of coffee did.

It was a longer drive than I would have liked, maybe 55 minutes in the car with a bright, cheerful man whose speed of speech and accent defeated my French but whose English was even worse and his Dutch was non-existent. If there is one thing that I dislike more than being cheerfulled at first thing in the morning it is being cheerfulled at in language I don't speak.

Dubont's house was a nice one just far enough out from the Paris sprawl that it was surrounded by enough ground for a reasonable garden and a chicken run.

I'll spare you the details tedious details of the forensic work at the property. The intruder seemed to have knowledge of the address, both Blanc and Noir were forced to agree on that, while the locks had been changed the previous day as Monsieur Dubont's keys were missing with his clothes Mrs Dubont had placed her emergency spare in the same hiding place she had always used. The intruder had taken the cash they kept in the house along with several men's watches, an antique diamond tie pin, various cufflinks and other valuables. They seem to have knocked over a vase that smashed into the window on their way out, creating the noise, a sloppy error that didn't fit in well with the otherwise precision operation. I took a moment to examine the photos next to the damaged window, just to make sure this didn't all turn out to be the effect of the mortuary camera. My quirk still told me Mr Dubont hadn't died. His parent had however, liver failure and skull fracture from a fall.

What struck me as odd was not just that many of the stolen objects had been in drawers or boxes hidden away in various places but that Mr Dubont's property was all that was stolen. Several rings for example were sat out on Mrs Dubont's beside table and hadn't been touched. Blanc and Noir agreed that it was suspicious, although their theories as to why diverged, him favouring torture despite there being no trace of it on the body (not too unreasonable if there was no trade of death either) and her favouring Dubont possessing something the intruder had been after, although that didn't explain how they knew where everything was hidden.

Neither of these ideas made much sense to me but I couldn't come up with my own. All my attempts at a third explanation fell short however on the question, why only take his stuff?

No one seemed to expect to find the stolen goods, even if it was put about they were connected to a murder they would likely be sold in the catacombs, where the Gendamerie go only in the most extreme of circumstances. The underworld leaders would probably hand an actual murderer over, unless it was a sanctioned killing, but stolen goods? It was better than it had been however, 50 years ago they would have had to have sent heroes in after a murder suspect, and might only have gotten him back in a body-bag.

The initial sweep took most of the day, it was nearly 4 by the time I was back with the police. I walked in on Noir dragging Blanc kicking, screaming and swearing through a timeline exercise which he clearly felt was a waste of time.

I decided to start at the beginning, having decided to see if I could find anything that would explain my confusion, if only so I could go home and leave everyone else to this mess, after all I didn't need to find the killer, just explain what was up with the death.

The first thing in my file was Dr Triste's of the French Health Bureau's witness statement. As I thought the body was found, naked, stretched out on the slab in the secondary preparation room. She'd arrived first thing in the morning and had gone looking for him while, hang on, while waiting for her team?

"Why do you need a team to do a spot inspection?"

"Pardon?" Came the simultaneous response from Blanc and Noir.

"Dr Triste, it says here she arrived ahead of her team, in fact it says here it was part of an ongoing investigation. Do they know something we don't? If you'll excuse me."

I left the small room and called the number listed under the contact details on the witness statement.

"Allo." The voice was oddly distorted and metallic, a consequence of her quirk I found out when I met her years later.

"Ah, hello, my name is Leo Daguerre. I am have been called in to help with the Dubont case. I have a few further questions if its ok?"

"One moment." The line changed over to a tinny rendition of some classical music or another. "Where have you been called from?"

"I am a Hague operations expert support specialist."

"Are you at the office now?"

"Yes." I said, trying to work out what the purpose of this strange line of questioing was.

"May I call you back in, 10 minutes?"

"Ah, yes?"

"Merci."

I went back into the meeting room to find Noir and Blanc sat determinedly ignoring each other while reviewing case notes. Part of me expected me to bump into them fondling each other, its bizzare the toxic ideas that get burned into your mind by media isn't it?

It was nearer 20 minutes, to the point that I was worried I would have to leave before getting the call, when someone brought the office phone over.

"Mr Daguerre?"

"Dr Triste?"

"Indeed. Please pardon my taking the time to check your idenity and location, but the case I am handling has the potential to be," I could practically hear her sorting through her library of political euphemisms "deeply upsetting to the public at large."

I felt my eyebrows rise involuntarily, either we used a different library or this was a major public scandal in the offing.

"You know the parameters I have to operate under I am sure. We don't walk to the press without prior approval."

"I was just keen to ensure you were not the press."

"Sensible. So, I just need to ask a few questions about the day you found the body. Firstly, might I know why you were at the address? It says is it was in relation to an ongoing investigation?"

"Naturellement, I am working with Sauterelle, you know her?"

Class 4 Urban hero, late 20s, green costume with yellow accents, quirk that allowed her to jump in mid-air, based in central Paris, Graduate of The Skarlatos Highschool, current member of Video-Hero, provisional member of Le Triomph's reserve team. "The super-jump hero? Not personally."

"Some six months ago she captured a villain who, in exchange for consideration at trial, has given us information of a most disturbing nature. It appears that a small but regular amount of human flesh passes through the catacombs market. We confirmed this by managing to obtain a sample. The material shows signs of professional handling and, as we cannot make an arrest of the seller, we have been trying to find the source. It has proven most difficult, in part as we cannot identify the source of the bodies."

I could understand her comments about public upset. Cannibalism is one of those crimes that never fails to disturb the populous in general. "You aren't with the health authority are you?"

"I am but, how to say, temporarily assigned there. I am usually intelligence liaison with La Triomph." That made sense.

"An you say you don't know where the bodies are coming from?"

"Non. We have tried to find patterns in lost-persons cases, in fact it seems we have been sending you a number of possible subjects, it seems you have been working this case for a while now. No matches, no pattern we can find so no lead."

"What made you suspect Dubont?"

"We've had a number of possible suspect under surveillance. His movements, his finances, he makes a regular delivery in person to an address at strange hours. But then I find he dead."

Have you ever had that feeling in the pit of your stomach that you know what's going on and the fact that it seems ridiculous only makes you more certain? I had it now.

"How long has this, ah, product been on the market?"

"We are not sure. We think, a long time."

"I suppose you had to get your sample verified? How did you do that?"

"We took a full DNA sequence, our first plan was to compare to the crime victim database, but we were unsuccessful."

"One second." I looked up, Noir and Blanc were both watching me, clearly expecting something. "Do we have Dubont's DNA profile?"

"To eliminate his DNA at the crime-scene yes." Blanc said as Noir picked up the actual file with the report.

"Has it been uploaded digitally yet?"

Noir flicked to the back page. "This afternoon."

I went back to the phone. "Do you have access to the crime victim database right now?"

"Yes, I am still in the office." This last comment seemed a bit pointed, keeping civil servants at our desks after 5:30 upsets us.

"You haven't re-run the profile recently?"

"No point. The sample is nearly four months old."

"Humour me."

I heard a few moments of frustrated muttering and the sound of a computer starting. Then more muttering. Then a string of French that I am not sure I understood or would like to repeat in polite company.

"Its Dubont isn't it?"

"Oui, but how?"

I put the phone on speakerphone. "Dr, you are on speakerphone." Well it was only polite to tell her. "Here is my working theory. I believe that Phillipe Dubont possesses, please note the present tense, a flawed duplication quirk. It is possible, based on the timeline of renovations to the abattoir, that his father possessed it too, the original plan was certainly his. I think that he must be able to create inert, lifeless, duplicates of his own physical body. This would explain a number of things. Firstly it explains why his DNA matches a four month old flesh sample. It would also explain why the body in the morgue doesn't activate my quirk, it it was never alive then it never died. Mr Dubont is, literally, the source of the human meat entering the catacombs."

Blanc perked up. "The Dr, she must have disturbed him in his preparations. He hears or sees her coming, he cannot hide a body in time and so is forced to go into hiding, to fake his death."

Noir nodded. "The break-in, he knew his wife placed a spare key, he knew where the valuables were, he even only took his own property rather than stealing from her." Noir and Blanc both made for the door, Noir beating Blanc by a narrow margin. Outside I could hear her telling someone to put out Dubont's description locally whereas Blanc seemed to be calling the transport authority. Both seemed pointless to me, he'd had over a day to get wherever he was going.

"I must go, I must pass this possibility to La Triomph." The line dropped.

I sat there for a moment, wondering if there was anything else I should do, but The Crab wouldn't be interested until she knew she could recall me. So I went to get dinner.

Despite my initial plans, I ended up having fish.

It turns out I was wrong, Blanc's impulse had been right on the money. After spending a morning explaining our (it was amazing how quickly it became our) theory we came back from lunch to positive news. They hadn't found Dubont, but they had found him on CCTV leaving Paris about 8 hours after his house was broken into, more or less confirming my theory. They were busy tracking him via cameras and passenger records, he seemed to be heading in the direction of Brest. By mid-afternoon we had identified a cousin living in Leeds. It was at that point it was decided I had fulfilled my mandate and packed for the return journey to The Hauge.

Upon arriving at work the next day there was an email from Dr Canard thanking me for my help, in particular for preventing his reputation being ruined. There was another from the _Commissaire de Paris'_ office politely informing me that Mr Dubont had been picked up by the Border Authority in England. The only problem now seemed to be working out how to charge him with something that would result in more than a fine.

You know, its funny. Not once when interviewed about the case that got her a reserve spot on a national team did Sauterelle ever mention me. Even the Paris police got a mention, so maybe just no one told her.


End file.
